Replication Package for "How Police Behavior Shapes Perceptions of Protests: Evidence from Black Lives Matter" 
September 2024

Authors: Jasmine English, Ariel R. White, Laurel Eckhouse
Journal: Perspectives on Politics

This replication package contains data and code to reproduce the tables and figures presented in both the main paper and the SI. There are three separate sets of analyses: those based on the hand-coded dataset of BLM protests compiled by the research team, those based on the main survey experiment discussed in the paper, and those based on the pilot survey experiment presented in the SI. We provide the following datasets:

1) "fullcleanedBLMprotests_July2014March2017_supplementingRobinson2017.Rdata" - This is the main observational BLM protest dataset described in the paper, including our hand codings of various protest features such as police presence. 

The variables in this dataset are drawn from several sources. Columns 8-29 contain our hand-coded protest-event variables: details about how each of these were coded appear in SI section 1.1.The fields appended with "item" (columns 2-6) were drawn from Alisa Robinson's original online database of BLM protests at elephrame.net. The "additionalarticles" column tracks additional URLS we or RA's found while searching for information about protests that would allow us to code our variables of interest. The geographic and population fields ("placefips7", "fips5","INTPTLONG","INTPTLAT","AFFGEOID_COUNTY","COUNTYFP_COUNTY","STATEFP_COUNTY","NAME_COUNTY",  "GEO.id","GEO.id2","GEO.display.label","HD01_VD01.x")  come from a merge to 2013 ACS data from the Census Bureau, using city name and state to merge to census "places."  The remaining variables are constructed/recoded from other columns in the dataset (for example, turning factor into binary variables or continuous variables into factors). 

2) "ourdataset_withcampusprotests_trimmedforwilliamsoncomparison.Rdata" - This is a smaller subset of our dataset generated earlier in the data-construction process, provided for comparison of protests included here to those included in Williamson et al (discussed in SI section 1.2). It is not needed to reproduce any of the figures or tables in the paper or SI. 

3) "county_adjacency.txt" - This is a Census dataset of county adjacency used by "observational_protest_analysis.R" to calculate how many people in the US saw a protest occur in their or a neighboring county. It is not needed to reproduce any of the figures or tables in the paper or SI. 

4) "PEP_2014_PEPANNRES_with_ann.csv" - This is a Census dataset of county populations used by "observational_protest_analysis.R" to calculate how many people in the US saw a protest occur in their or a neighboring county. It is not needed to reproduce any of the figures or tables in the paper or SI. 

5) "police_0522_cleaned.csv" - This dataset contains all responses to the main (April 2022, Prolific) survey experiment presented in the paper, with some columns omitted for anonymity and readability. This dataset is used to produce the main figures and tables about respondents' support and perceptions of BLM protests.  

6) "ProtestSurvey1_2019-11-04-with randomizer-flagged_cleaned" - This dataset contains all responses to the pilot MTurk survey experiment mentioned in the paper and presented in the SI, with some columns omitted for anonymity and readability. This dataset is used to produce Table A4 in the SI, about the pilot study's outcome measures and differences in means.


We provide the following analysis scripts:
1) "observational_protest_analysis.R" - This script pulls in the BLM protest dataset described in the first half of the paper and generates descriptive tables and figures presented in the main paper and SI (including Figure 1/Table 1) as well as statistics provided in text. 

2) "police_experiment_analysis_replication.R" - This script produces the figures found in the main paper for effects of police presence on perceptions of violence and support for the protests. It also produces the tables found in the SI for support and perceptions of the protests.

3) "MTurk_pilotexperiment_replication.R" - This script produces Table A4 found in the SI, with estimates from the pilot survey experiment.


Full list of tables and figures:
1) Main paper: Table 1, Figure 1, Figure 5, Figure 6, Figure 7, Figure 8
2) SI: Table A1, Table A2, Table A3, Table A4, Table A5, Table A6, Table A7, Table A8, Table A9, Table A10, Figure A1, Figure A2


Email Ariel White (arwhi@mit.edu) with questions about this replication package. 







